Notes on pre-Fletcher professional experience

So often we’re asked a question that can take two forms, depending on who’s asking:

1. What type of work should I do after completing my undergraduate degree to prepare me for Fletcher?

2. Does my professional experience make me a good candidate for admission to Fletcher?

As I’ve written before, there’s (alas) no correct answer to these questions. The professional experience that will be valuable for one post-Fletcher career may not help to advance another. Nonetheless, though there’s never going to be a tidy answer to pass along, that doesn’t mean I can’t guide you toward a better understanding of why such brief questions elicit such unwieldy responses. To do so, I thought I’d connect readers to sources on the blog and elsewhere through which you can see for yourself the diversity of our students’ pre-Fletcher experience.

I’ll start off my experience round-up by pointing you toward several blog features. First, there are the Five-Year Updates. In these posts, alumni describe their paths to and through Fletcher, and you can see how they have brought together their pre-Fletcher work and Fletcher studies to launch new careers. There’s also the growing feature on First-Year Alumni. Naturally, these graduates don’t yet have the perspective of their fellow alums who graduated earlier, but you might like to see how everything (Fletcher and pre-Fletcher experience) comes together directly after leaving Fletcher. I’ll be adding more posts from our 2013 graduates throughout the coming months. Finally, there are the posts in the Student Stories feature. Although the writers this year and last cover an assortment of topics, each of them provides an introductory post.

Beyond the blog, there are many student profiles on the Fletcher website. You can find a selection of students who entered in 2011, 2012, and 2013, as well as recent alumni. If you prefer, you can also access profiles by degree program on the MALD, MIB, MA, LLM, and PhD pages.

With the application deadline coming up on Friday, maybe this is an odd time to be providing information like this. On the other hand, I know that applicants’ questions on their credentials don’t actually stop when they submit the application. Maybe this isn’t such an odd time after all.